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The Cipher

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Everything posted by The Cipher

  1. So I got this done today. Took the bulk of the day. Will summarize key points since others indicated it might be helpful. Arrived Chaengwattana at 10:45am. Had to fill in a Covid screening form before being allowed to enter the building. You have to complete that form and show proof of a negative ATK test taken 72hrs before attempted entry or proof of vaccination before being allowed to enter. When I arrived I was given queue number 86. The number being served was 26. So that would be 60 people in front of me. Hoo boy. Not sure when closing time is, but the cutoff time to get a queue number is 3:45pm. The slip of paper that you get with your queue number on it has a QR code. You can scan that QR code to see the number of people remaining in line in front of you. I opened that QR link in a mobile browser and refreshed it throughout the day (you need to manually refresh to see the number change). That last bullet point is important because it means you can leave the immigration area - or even the CW complex - and have some degree of timing certainty on when you need to return. So I went to Central Chaengwattana. Arrived there at around 11:30am and had an early lunch. Then went to go sit at a cafe. Refreshed phone one every 30 minutes initially. Then every 15-20 once it got closer to my number. When there was 19 people remaining in front of me, I headed back to the immigration complex. Which ended up being just in time since when I arrived back at the door, there were only 10 people left in front of me in the queue. And you still have to fill out the Covid screening paper to enter the building - except you might not have to if you show the guy handing out those papers your queue slip. I showed him mine and told him I was in a rush and he let me go through without completing the screening a second time. By the time I arrived back in the immigration waiting room there were only 6 people left in front of me. The queue moved a lot faster after the lunch break than before it. Not sure if that's a consistent trend. When I got called up, a nice immigration officer processed my documents and...told me that my TM 30 was incomplete. It's mandatory to get a Covid extension. Ah sh-t, right? A looooot of people were getting turned back due to TM 30. Make sure you have that sorted before heading to immigration. The immigration officer told me that if I could get TM 30 updated by my landlord within 30 minutes, I could skip the queue and go back to him. Otherwise I would need a new number. It was 2:20pm at this point, so like four hours after I first arrived. No way was I going to go through that again. Lucky for me, I rent a condo directly from the property management arm of a major developer. I contacted them by LINE and told them about the situation and the deadline. They were able to get TM 30 updated within the 30 minute window (just). Unless your property is professionally managed, I wouldn't count on that tho. Will reiterate - have TM 30 updated before arriving. Really I heard a lot of people getting rejected for that reason. Anyway, I submitted my TM 30 document, signed the forms, paid and they took my passport. But apparently I also needed a photo of myself and a printed copy of my e-visa to submit, neither of which I had. Damn. I'm not usually this disorganized. Got lucky again - immigration officer told me to just go downstairs, take the photo, print the doc, and then return and give it to him without waiting in line again. So I did just that. Smooth sailing after that. Waited for them to return my passport (about 15 minutes) and then got right out of there and hailed a cab. By the time I left it was between 3:30 and 3:45. So that would be 5 hours after I originally arrived. You could do it faster if you weren't an idiot like me and had TM30 and the photo/visa printout prepared. But not that much faster - would still probably be a four hour wait if you arrived at the same time as me today. Note that one of those hours was the mandatory lunch break wherein the queue doesn't move. The waiting room and general area around immigration were super full every time I was in there. I feel bad for the folks who didn't know about the QR code tracking and just sat in the room the whole time. If you didn't know, well, now you know. That concludes my summary and review of my CW experience. Turns out that you can renew your visa on the day it expires. Thanks again to everyone who gave me helpful advice here. Cheers.
  2. I live in Bangkok so will probably go to Chaengwattana first thing Monday morning. I've never applied for a Covid extension before, so this would be the first. Thanks all for the helpful advice. ????
  3. Hi all. I'm on an (extended) TR visa. It expires this coming Monday (Mar 7). I mismanaged my schedule and didn't keep tabs on the date, and the reminder in I'd set in my phone only pinged me at 4pm this evening to inform me that expiration date was this Monday ????. Ideally I'd like to stay in Thailand until the end of April and intended to pick up the Covid extension while they were still being handed out, but due to my visa expiring on Monday (which is the next day that immigration is open), I'm not sure if it's too late to apply for the extension on expiration day. Can anyone kindly advise? Thanks!
  4. Actually I was thinking about this today, and not out of arrogance or a sense of superiority. I joined this forum because I was interested in learning more about the lives of the Western retirees I saw around Bangkok but never had a chance to interact with, and I feel like I've accomplished that goal. I'm not sure what purpose I serve here anymore and so I think this may be my last post for some time. I realize nobody cares, I'm just musing. Will probably continue to lurk occasionally tho, because I owe a dude a coffee and the only way he knows how to reach me is on AseanNow. I'll respond to some of your other points below, but if you'd like to continue the convo thereafter and are in Bangkok in the next three months, feel free to DM me and we can grab a beer or something (I'm around until end of March). Would at least be more fun to do that. Nothing is difficult about getting a college degree-ish. In that the requirements of college (both admission and expectations) now are so low that it seems like almost anyone can attend university and graduate with a degree. What I would suggest is pernicious about the college game, is that: (i) they essentially tack on a mandatory four extra years post high school, which carries an opportunity cost; (ii) the cost of a college education in America has (and continues to) increase at a significantly faster rate than wage growth, which causes a ton of young people to get enter adulthood with a monster pile of debt; (iii) information available to high school students and other prospective applicants tends to be unevenly distributed such that many of the people who make poor decisions about college are those who are most in need of what they believe is education's promise of upward-mobility; and (iv) the utility of a college degree is more questionable than ever (essentially rent-seeking gatekeepers to employment), particularly in an era where almost anything can be learned to an elite level online and with some willpower, but in this world the credential still matters. TLDR: Implicit (opportunity) and explicit costs of college are high and getting higher. But university's increasingly dubious value prop continues to be upheld by cultural legacy. Pressure is higher, pace of innovation is faster, and sources of competition have increased. This is true at all tiers of society except the tippity top. In the working classes we've seen a hollowing-out of traditional sources of employment, increased pressure due to competition from overseas workers (offshoring) and machines, wage suppression due to those same factors of globalization + technology, and an increasing number of people checking out and/or turning to unhealthy coping mechanisms. In the professional classes we've seen the bar of expectations rise steadily. A ton of professionals place their kids on a competitive path towards an 'elite' profession from basically as soon as they enter high school and those kids walk that path with the single-minded goal of passing recruiting in college. And the reward for those kids that make it past the professional gates is...100 hour work weeks and the crucible of professional expectations. And competition is getting fiercer because at this tier, everyone is looking for an edge. As the competitive frontier pushes outwards and upwards (at increasingly velocity, I might add), everyone has to rise to meet it or be left behind. It's no fun. Younger generations in general also tend not to be beneficiaries of (and thus are negatively affected by) the asset price boom relative to wage levels. Expanding on this could fill a book in itself and would also get pretty technical, but there's probably been plenty written about this on Google if topic is of interest. I don't remember saying this. If I did say this, I'm not sure the context it was in. I think that the older generations alive today (as a generalization) enjoyed a relatively easier path to wealth accumulation, but in terms of meaningful material day to day things I'm not sure there's too much of a difference. If anything younger generations would be the winners here because of wider diversity of available products and entertainment/experience options. I mean, nobody is accusing Boomers of maliciously rigging the system here (at least I'm not). But as a large-in-number group, Boomers have enjoyed a ton of political power for most of their lives. Because they're such a large portion of the electorate, policies tend to be favorable to the demographic in general. Not sure if this would be best described as a feature or a bug of democracy. Some quick examples would be: beneficiaries of generous social security that may not ultimately be available to other generations; simultaneously requiring relatively large societal burden of care due to aging en masse; NIMBYism that would benefit younger gens (for example densification of residential neighbourhoods in high cost cities); Brexit lol; Covid policies that disproportionately affected younger people to the benefit of older people, while simultaneously exacerbating intergenerational wealth inequality due to policies that preserved pension and home values at the expense of incomes; etc. I ascribe no maliciousness to these actions, it's just a group swaying the political calculus in their own interest due to happening, by chance, to be a massive voting bloc. But facts are that this resulted in a privileged political position not (yet) enjoyed by other gens. --- Anyway, this post = probably my swan song as an AseanNow poster. I'll revert to lurking occasionally. Thanks for taking the time to chat with me!
  5. I feel like I should clarify that my employer is a PE firm. We're generally not public markets investors. Also, not sure what to say if you think that this is true. Information flow is stupid high and gets higher every year. Connectivity just means that you're on call 24/7 too. Don't believe me? Do my job for a month. If you put in genuine effort and survive 30 days, you can keep the salary (which might make you blush). Don't appreciate this characterization tho. Spent 30 minutes on a post that AseanNow zapped. Re-writing that post plus this post would be another 30 minutes. I do keep in mind that every minute I spend on AN is expected value negative (ie, I spend time to do sth, but have no expected return on time spent). I have a fairly demanding job, run a business, am doing a data science bootcamp, and also have to find time for life admin + leisure and personal life. Gotta guard time carefully.
  6. I wrote a long response to your post and when I pressed 'Submit Reply' I got an error page and now that post is lost. Now I'm dejected and just not interested in writing all that again????. I'll just say that the previous post I made answered more of your questions than perhaps you thought it did. And if you read it again and don't agree, then I was completely wrong and see it 100% your way now.
  7. It took longer than expected, but gradually we're seeing more and more people tuning Covid out. Anecdotal, but this seems to be a trend all over the world. Sooner or later enough people are going to stop responding to "tHe hEaltHcArE sYsTeM iS goINg tO bE oVeRwHeLmeD" and "tHinK aBouT oThErS" that there just won't be any political will for more restrictions. We'll probably have to queue up to get our annual booster, but I imagine the restrictions on travel and day to day life will gradually be relaxed for good. There's no practical reason that we couldn't drop restrictions immediately, so it just takes a critical mass of people ready to normalize Covid and we can all get on with it. It'll happen.
  8. You can find some great Asian food in North America. Some of it better than in Asia. Mostly in bigger coastal cities. Every small town does seem to have at least one Asian restaurant (usually Chinese) but those ones tend to be pretty lousy, or at least inauthentic. Hard to blame the chefs tho, gotta cater to market tastes to stay in business.
  9. I realize you mean well with this post, but I'd suggest that following this recommendation would be irresponsible for a large number of the retirees in Thailand. If retiree is 65+ with a couple hundred Gs in investable assets and a non-inflation-indexed fixed pension, that guy definitely should not be dropping 10gs on a Rollie for 'diversification.' What's the hedge there, a barter asset for the post-apocalypse world? Also would tend to caution against material allocations to crypto for (most) seniors. High vol risk-on assets in rapidly evolving markets probably isn't the play if retired and needing to stretch pension income/nest egg. Finally I'm not too familiar with LTFs/SSFs (are they Thailand-specific products?) but they appear to have a lockup period. Might 10 years be too riskily long a lockup period for a retired person? Sorry. Not trying to be a pest. Just offering an alternative perspective.
  10. Man that's great! And I'm happy for you. But I bet you weren't doing it on your MIL's ฿3,600 monthly income tho. Income sufficiency matters, but that's not taught in school or even in most personal finance classes (which tend to focus exclusively on saving). And I'm not trying to pick on you or your MIL here. Sorry if it comes across like that. I just happen to be passionate about this topic and could talk all day about it.
  11. I understand what you're saying. But my personal view is that this is the wrong perspective because it sets extremely tight constraints on a person's reality. The limits of the village essentially become the limits of a person's world in that case. If you set the target to 'subsistence', sure you can live on nothing, but how many things in this world will you never see/own/do/experience. Yeah. Buying daily coffee isn't an optimal use money and probably bad for your health in many cases given the sugar in there. Cutting coffee purchases is probably beneficial (make at home for health). But re: finances, for most people 50 THB per day ought to be immaterial. If that's making/breaking their periodic savings then I would suggest that most of them have a bigger problem than coffee purchases (ie, income sufficiency and/or expense issues elsewhere on their income statement).
  12. A few thoughts on this article. (1) It's really unfortunate that personal finance isn't taught in schools. People should have access to this info. If someone will translate and distribute I'll write/teach a beginners course for free. (2) The quoted guy is right. Budgeting is critical and prioritizing the savings bucket before allocating the spending bucket is also the right move. But at the same time like, if you're earning 30,000 and saving 10% that's like...$100 per month. Better than nothing but probably not gonna get you to where you want to be, either. Man I hate these coffee examples (not sure why everyone uses coffee as the example). Specifically because saving 50 THB/day isn't enough to move the needle. 50*365 = 18,250 in increased savings per year. Less than $1,000. Like, I get that it's an illustrative example, but damn - everyone seems to paint coffee as the spending villain. Maybe I'm just triggered because I buy a lot of coffee ???? Anyway this brings me to the final point: (3) cutting spending is bounded on the lower end by zero. Can't spend less than 0. But increasing earnings really has no upper limit. Teaching people to be responsible with their money is important, but I feel that part of that financial responsibility ought to be making sure that you have enough income to live a good life while also being responsible on the savings/investment front. The art of personal finance is walking the line between living well today and planning for the future. Starting early and expanding income is the best way to make sure you can do both.
  13. Nah. You could hit me with Delta too. I've been rolling my eyes at Covid restrictions since the start. Still was a good boy and got my shots and wore my mask tho. But it's been two years lost to this sh-t. What are we supposed to do, stay home forever? No.
  14. Sorry WHO, I'm going out on NYE ????. Covid or no Covid. If I get and/or spread Omicron, it is what it is I guess. ????‍♂️
  15. I'm on the fence about whether to respond, because it feels like kinda a lose-lose proposition. Ie, I spend precious time writing a response that will probably be unappreciated in nuance and may make readers feel uncomfortable (and why would I want to cause someone's discomfort for no gain). But I'll quickly humour a reply so it doesn't look like I was unable to respond. First, I'm not here writing pity-me posts. I'm just pointing out observations. I'm a Wall Street investment analyst from a good family and with relatively fortunate genetics. Nobody should feel bad for me. So the first thing I'll do is illustrate with a simple game of True/False that it's possible to begin to put together a profile of an 'expected value' AseanNow member. T/F: Males on AseanNow are highly overrepresented relative to their prevalence in broad society such that you would reasonably expect most posts on AseanNow to be written by a male. T/F: Persons age 50+ on AseanNow are highly overrepresented relative to their prevalence in broad society such that you would reasonably expect most posts on AseanNow to be written by a person aged 50+. T/F: Whites/people of European descent are overrepresented relative to their prevalence in broad society and even more specifically, relative to their proportion of Thailand's non-Burmese/Cambodian foreign population, such that you would expect most posts on AseanNow to be written by a white person/person of European descent. Etc. So my Dad (age 70) has no post secondary education of any kind but had a long career as a software engineer because degrees weren't considered mandatory back when he was entering the workforce. By the time he retired, a masters degree for entry level software engineer at his company had become the expectation. That's years more of school and, for many kids, tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt. Similarly, when my parents bought a house in my hometown of Vancouver they paid approx $300,000 in 1990. 30 years later the house is valued at literally 10x the purchase price. This is a similar story in many 'desirable' global cities. Did wages 10x between 1990 and 2020? According to Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), median individual income in the US in 2020 was approx $36,000. Even if we pretend that it's $50,000 for giggles, how are you surviving on that? Let alone managing to save a meaningful amount for retirement? Which brings me to this point that a large number of people in the (developed) world are living in a state that could reasonably be defined as economic precarity. "Hit stability" in this case would be to achieve a comfortable and stable middle class life. (You know, responsibly attaining house with a white picket fence, two kids, and a car. Maybe a dog.) This divide tends be (although not solely) intergenerational, with younger generations amassing less wealth despite more education than older generations. I'm not pulling this stuff out of my butt here lol. As all of these links indicate, this is a well documented phenomena. I supported pretty much none of the responses. I'm incredibly anti-lockdown and anti-restriction. Cost of Covid aversion not remotely worth the benefit. In fact, a period unchecked Covid might actually have been beneficial for society in the long run, but that's a diff discussion. I mean, perhaps a more relevant question would be: how is the game not different? The world has always changed. But the rate of change now is unprecedented. Because of my job, investments, and just general curiosity, I monitor the pulse of the world on a pretty ongoing basis (seriously, the amount of data that crosses my path on a daily basis would probably sound unbelievable to most people here). And despite being constantly plugged into changes, I find it more difficult than ever to keep on top of changes and, more importantly for what I do, to try and determine the trajectory of the future. The rate of obsolescence and speed of tech/skill adoption to remain within some reasonable proximity of the competitive frontier is nuts. And the consequences of being left behind are increasingly big (gains concentrate at the top while middle is hollowed out). During your youth you could be reasonably sure that the time investment to learn some skill would be usable for decades. This was true for most of human history. Now? I'm not sure that anything I put my time into learning/building won't be done better by ML algos within 5-10 years. Is this good or bad? I don't know. I don't think that question matters. It just is. There's no point worrying about stuff you can't control. Figuring out how to handle your business in the shifting environment is the game. Which brings me to this concluding point. And I want to try and put this delicately because my intention isn't to offend. But I'm genuinely not sure how you can look at the world before/after the internet and globalization and believe that the rate and scale of change is the same. I see people (not necessarily you) say "has nothing changed" from time to time, and I wonder what the confines of their world must be like. Like, yes. It's possible to live out a relatively simple existence. But so much of the world will always remain closed to those people. I can see how checking out might be attractive, but unless self-actualization and genuine freedom have been achieved, I don't think it's the right move.
  16. Not exactly. When you read something that someone writes, that tells you something about the writer, right? Do that enough and with a large enough sample, and you glean enough information to reason out some (probably) pretty reliable conclusions. Without going into a ton of detail and examining Western societies only, Boomers tended to have a significantly easier path to stability than later generations. You can't look at contextless numbers when it comes to stuff like wages. You'd need to look at that stuff relative to cost of living and, more importantly, cost of assets. Most relevant would be stuff like median income to house prices, and how many units of the S&P 500 you could buy with a median paycheque. Those ratios standardize differences in values over time, because your purchasing power is always relative to the cost of goods/assets. You can do a quick Google search to see that key metrics of affordability have declined from the period of your youth to mine. Basically any career you chose (even out of high school! because u didn't need post-secondary edu for decent employment as a Boomer if you didn't want it) provided an immediate path to reliable stability for financially responsible people. Can you say that now? We could then move on to the topic of gov pensions, which my generation may or may not enjoy (hard to say how UBI schemes will evolve), or defined benefit pensions, which basically didn't even exist by the time I entered the workforce. And personally, I think relying on a pension for retirement is a suckers game. But the reality is the most people in every generation need some form of basic income for survival because their savings won't cut it. This space also probably deserves a mention on the political privilege that you enjoyed as the largest generational voting bloc for decades. Policies, in general, tend to be favorable to your demographic. And this isn't even me being bitter. It's just facts. I'm aware that most of you faced individual struggles. Everyone does. But as a generalization between generations, it doe very much seem to have been easier to hit stability in the past than now. If you don't think the game's changed, I would suggest that maybe you're not aware of the nature of the game you're in. Hint: It's self-actualization -> real freedom -> legacy. (Further, retirement ≠ actual freedom for many people). Just a singular event - Covid 19 - has changed a ton of stuff. For instance I'm a lot less office-bound than I used to be and can now work remotely. Which frees me up to live in places like Bangkok for part of the year. Since 2000 we've gone through - and are looking at further - paradigm shifts in broad policy stances, geopolitics, central banking/finance, and culture. Compounding all of this is the impact of technology on all of those trends, which is advancing/changing the world faster than it ever has. So whether your goal is to win and achieve something, or even just to live a stable relatively stress-free life, it feels increasingly more challenging to confidently chart a path than perhaps it ever has.
  17. To some degree sure. I write a lot of things in this space that I would probably not say unprompted if you met me in person. But quality of thought is evident regardless of anonymity. The internet has anon personalities/communities where post and discourse quality is significantly higher than AseanNow. My comment was not regarding seniors specifically, but rather the members of this particular community who just happen to also be seniors (generally). I think that the members of this forum are remarkably privileged from a global perspective. You guys (Boomers from Western countries) are the beneficiaries of an intersection of different positive factors. You guys got to play the game on easy mode compared to subsequent generations. And even now tend to be the beneficiaries of policy choices just due to power at the polls. But the game's different now, and part of what I find so fascinating/frustrating about this place is watching AN members as they try and make sense of this new world that they find themselves living in. And admittedly it's a challenging place to navigate successfully for any of us, including me.
  18. Well which part of the characterization that I laid out would be false then? I apologize, because I'm not trying to be difficult or to single you out in particular, but from time to time I make some unpopular posts (posting truths that are probably better left unsaid is a personal failing of mine). And folks are quick to accuse me of being wrong, but when I press them on exactly what I'm wrong about they conspicuously vanish. But from my perspective, I see spade -> I say "that's a spade!" And it's totally fine if people don't appreciate these posts, but I would prefer that respondents at least have the intellectual honesty to say "I am emotionally upset by what you've written" or "There was no need to broach this uncomfortable truth. You're a jerk, Cipher." Perhaps more importantly if readers don't want to be so easily lumped into certain categories...well, I would encourage them to do something to change their situation. Everybody wants to feel important/special, but so few actually put in the work. Man, there's no shortcut for most of us - and that includes me. Put in the work. It's worth it. Again, sorry Yellowtail. This screed wasn't directed at you in particular. I had to reply to someone and you just happened to be it.
  19. Not trying to devolve into bickering, but if there's a lie in my post you're free to point it out ????
  20. Actually this is a surprisingly accurate comment. Those characteristics do indeed describe most retirement men worldwide lol. But the point about 'how can you tell what the average poster here is like' still stands. Edit: To add, I guess we could drill down deeper to include more specific characteristics like 'cross cultural relationships wife/gf from Southeast Asia', but you get the point. The characteristics that I listed were those that stood out most jarringly to me compared to other older people that I interact with on/offline. However the chances that I live in a bubble are high, so it's possible that more of the world is like this than I appreciate.
  21. Honestly, it's not that hard. You can tell a lot about someone by what they say, what they don't say, how something is said, and what their perspective is on certain topics. It's not foolproof, but with a sample size as large as this forum it's pretty easy nail down the profile of a 'typical' member. Think about it. The profile is: white, male, age 50+, retired, net worth sub $1M (and if $1M+ wealth usually locked in primary home country residence), low-mid IQ, strongly external locus of control, relatively mass market tastes/preferences (shaped by formative environment) etc. Again, won't describe 100% of members, but I'd feel confident saying that bulk of users would cleanly check most of the above boxes.
  22. As a person who may or may not be a Brown graduate, I'm a little skeptical about this. Elite colleges tend to have two kinds of students: actually bright people, and legacy/privilege admissions from wealthy or notable families. Neither type seems to be particularly common on this forum. My first boss had saying: "Real recognize real. But that also means that real recognize(s) fake."
  23. Actually...for most people their immune system will do this just fine on its own. The booster just helps.
  24. This is by and large due (i) to the birds-of-a-feather effect, which ties in with (ii) the changing foreigner demographics of Thailand over time. As you've noticed, this particular forum has a critical mass of a certain type of person; so it naturally retains more of the same because they engage at a level and with an audience with whom they feel comfortable. Ie, a pool of people with similar life histories, IQs, knowledge/education levels, and socioeconomic status. So why would other demographics spend time here? Quality of information and discourse tends to be low. And the userbase is largely beyond help. So unless you find the folks here to be an entertaining curiosity (which I do, sadly) why waste the time? Possible exception for visa-specific questions. My subjective experience is that there are higher achieving foreigners in Thailand, but they tend to skew younger. And they congregate elsewhere online. Attachment to Thailand is smaller in that demographic and is more a marriage of convenience with shallower roots (although who knows if that'll evolve as time passes). Will Thailand continue to attract more of the type of retiree that characterizes AseanNow? I'm not sure. But I think it might - there are fairly solid advantages to retiring here for many people. Also, before anyone freaks out at me, this was a generalization of the audience group and does not refer to any specific individual(s).
  25. I think the issue here is the numerous AseanNow regulars want to feel superior, but without the difficult work of actually self-actualizing in any meaningful way.
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